This invention relates to knives, and, more particularly, to a knife with a cutting hook of the gut hook and skinning type.
An animal harvested in the field by a hunter must be quickly skinned and eviscerated. Too long a delay may adversely affect the quality of the meat. Thus, it is common practice for hunters to skin and clean the animal at the site of the kill.
The meat of the animal is covered by the hide and hair, which must be removed by skinning. A thin membrane lies between the hide and the meat. The viscera of the animal are enclosed within another membrane termed the "visceral linings", which also must be separated and removed during the cleaning operation. A clean removal of the viscera without puncturing the visceral linings is critical, as a puncturing of the visceral linings leads quickly to contamination of the meat.
To skin and clean the animal, the hunter usually hangs the animal by its legs. (Less preferably, the skinning and cleaning can be accomplished with the animal lying on the ground.) The hunter cuts through the layer of hide and hair so that it can be peeled away from the meat. After the hide and hair are removed, another cut is made through the layer of meat to permit it to be separated from the visceral lining containing the viscera.
It has long been common practice for hunters to use a conventional knife to perform the primary skinning and cleaning operations. To guide the knife, break the suction between the layers during the cutting operation, and prevent the knife from penetrating into the visceral lining, the hunter typically places the index and middle fingers of the guiding hand on either side, and slightly forward, of the point of the knife blade. The point of the knife blade is thereby covered by the hunter's fingers placed on either side of the blade to guide the knife, prevent the point from penetrating the visceral lining, and break the vacuum that would otherwise prevent the separation of the layers. The knife, with the hunter's fingers in place on either side of the blade, is pushed through the layers to be cut in the required pattern.
More recently, a special form of knife termed a "gut hook" or "skinning gut hook" has been developed. The gut hook includes a hook-shaped, backwardly facing, sharpened slot on the back side of the knife blade. To accomplish the cutting operation in the recommended manner, the hook is pushed through the layer to be cut and drawn toward the body of the hunter so that the hide or meat is cut by the sharpened interior of the slot.
In practice, the existing gut hooks fall short of achieving the desired function. The cutting operation requires an excessive amount of force. For many animal types, the hide tends to bunch in the sharpened slot, much as thick cloth tends to bunch when pushed into a fixed cutting slot. The cutting slot becomes jammed with the bunched hide, completely preventing further cutting. The existing gut hooks are not convenient to use and are not readily guided between the intended layers to be separated.
There is a need for an improved approach for a knife that can be used to skin animals in the field and for other functions similar in the respect that they require cutting of thick materials by a fixed cutting surface. The present invention fulfills this need, and further provides related advantages.